Sean Teale – star of Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s new sci-fi thriller series Incorporated – has learned in a hurry that you should never underestimate the future.

The Syfy series (in Canada the program will air on Showcase), which is shot in Toronto, takes place in a corporate-dominated 2074, where surveillance is everywhere, and our hero is trying to take down the power-structure from the inside under the guise of the ultimate company man.

“My character devises this helmet called Everclear that attaches itself to the frontal cortex of your brain. And if I were to say, ‘What does your passport look like?’ you’re already thinking about it. It technically means Julian (the security/interrogation expert, played by Dennis Haysbert) won’t have to extract information anymore.

“When I first read that in the script, I said, ‘This is bonkers! You’ve invented a mind-reading device. That’s insane.’”

Then he, director David Pastor and writer Ted Humphrey sat down for a screening of Werner Herzog’s documentary Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World, about the future of man and technology. There was a segment on an experimental MRI system that already is capable of mapping brain activity that correlates to specific ideas.

“That’s now. And we’re talking 50 years in the future. I was like, ‘My goodness, we’re going to be every scientists’ favourite show!’”

But like all good science fiction, Teale says Incorporated is, “100% about the present.

“In other interviews, I’ve been calling out Monsanto and Nestle. There’s no bullet in the back of my brain yet,” he says, cheerfully. “But corporations are doing some really nasty stuff, taking over things that don’t belong to them; the attempt to patent seeds is the most monstrous thing.” (In the pilot episode, we hear about Third World farmers revolting against the ownership of their seed crops).

In Incorporated, Teale plays a character with a foot in two worlds. The gleaming, urban, corporate-dominated Green Zone is where the rich lives. The dilapidated Red Zone is home to everyone else. In the Green Zone, Teale is Ben Larson, a fast-rising tech exec in a power suit who is married to a successful plastic surgeon named Laura (Allison Miller).

In reality, he is a denizen of the Red Zone named Aaron, involved in a years-long act of espionage that the viewer absorbs gradually. On the side, he’s tracking the whereabouts of Elena (Denyse Tontz), a woman from his past who may have been sold to sexual slavery.

The first post-Project Greenlight dramatic TV series by Ben Affleck and Matt Damon’s production company, Incorporated is an intense assignment for Teale, who is in nearly every scene. It’s also his second stint shooting in Toronto, following his role of Prince Conde in the Tudor-era series Reign.

“I love working here,” he says. “I’ve done the winter, I’ve done the summer, often in the same (TV) season.

“Oddly enough, it’s similar in intensity on this show, but only because of the workload. So where Reign was 22 episodes over a gruelling 10-and-a-half months, it was less work for me because I’d pop in for three or four days at a time.

“This time around – they will notice their mistake eventually – there’s a lot of me. It’s only 10 episodes, but I got 22 episodes worth of work in for sure.”

British-raised, but of Venezuelan descent and Spanish-speaking, the 24-year-old Teale says his casting is sometimes problematic.

“Literally, I’ve actually been paid to not shoot a movie after I’d been signed because I didn’t look all-American enough. I had to read between the lines. I don’t have blond hair and I’m not blue eyed. But if you’ve seen today’s America, it’s not always the case anyway.

“It was an Oscar-nominated director and he brought me back in and we pretended. He told me there was another front-runner I’d have to knock out, metaphorically. And that was it.”

“Here, I’m playing a man called Ben Larson, 30 years old, American. And it’s a 24-year-old Brit of Spanish descent playing him.” What tipped the scales in his favour, he says, was his ability to play both older and younger.

“You’re going to see a lot of Aaron in flashbacks. And they needed an actor who could play both 30 and 18 so they didn’t have to pay two people,” Teale says with a grin.